Fish Publishing

I'm very happy that my flash fiction made it into this anthology, but sad that the patron, Frank McCourt, has died. Anglea's Ashes was such an unsentimental tale of the worse of times.

I've just finished When Will There be Good News by Kate Atkinson. It was so brilliant I can't read anything else for a while and Reggie, one of her main characters, is constantly on my mind when I should be thinking about my characters. However, one of them has been behaving badly. I spent six weeks getting to know him and he's let me down. I never believed other writers when they wrote about their creations going off on a limb, but this is exactly what he' s done. I thought teenage sons were bad enough.

Fia of the Shed

My father, a burnt out advertising man, promised himself that when he retired he would build a shed and write his novel. It would have been good. I may not have liked it - his Gorbells humour could cut deep - but the writing of it would have satisfied him.

It never happened and now I am nearly the age he was when he died, I have his shed.
Of course it's not his or mine really.
The last tenents left it behind and no
wonder, it's so heavily insulated, I'm surprised it hasn't sunk into the earth.

Apparently, alledgedly, the last people grew funny plants in it. I did wonder at all the electrics and big lamps. And the spiders with their funky, unfinished webs.

I've wanted to show off my shed for a while but didn't want Debs to think I was suffering shed envy - although I do indeed envy her the lovely shed of sheds. And Grumpy.

Creating Characters

When I wrote my first novel which begat the next novel, which begat...yes this is how I seem to write. Am I alone in finishing a book, knowing it's rubbish but picking at the bones of it and creating another and another until, maybe, I'll have something that works?

My first novel, Sitting Pretty, had three POVs all in first person present and each protagonist was me, me, me.

My current WIP has just one and I'm using third person which took a while to feel as intimate with. But unlike Sitting Pretty when I rushed to just finish a M/S, I know that I have to build believeable people and let a good deal of the plot come from them.

There are lists all over the internet of questions to ask your characters which is all well and good but you have to know your actors before you can answer these and how to you do this?
Once you do know them inside out, then you can reveal them by the actions, thoughts and words of other characters but until then, you - or rather me because you may know how to do this all ready - have to put them together.

I don't have this problem with all of the people in my book, but two or three of them are proving a nightmare. I have started to build one of the men by using bits and pieces of past boyfriends - ouch! And then I've added a bit of 'what ifs' so I'll just have to see how they go.

Until they are all comfy in their skins, I can't write any more or do any more plotting apart from a loose story arc. I need them to get their bottoms into gear so they can add the tension, my flabby plot so desperately needs.

I am an Aries. I have zero patience so perhaps I can be forgiven for being a bit snarly while they discover themselves? Oh, and any books you can recommend would be much appreciated. I have thought about one or two I've seen on Amazon.

Sorry about the stick people with their elephant ears. Poor things, no wonder my characters don't trust me.

Death of a Cat

Yesterday afternoon the car in front of me knocked down a cat. It lay, kicking, on its back while the car drove off. I stopped, remembered my hazards and ran over thinking, please die now, die now.
The cat was bleeding from everywhere. I knew it was hopeless because of a pet first aid course I’d laughed my way through. We’d practised on a dog manikin called Casper – CPR, get it? Made jokes about his lack of gender and other childish stuff.
But I felt for a pulse in the cat’s femoral artery – nothing. Now I knew that the writhing and the kicking were nerves and adrenalin. But my eyes didn’t believe this.
I carried him to the pavement, cradled his warm ginger body and told him that, had he lived, he would have been a king among cats, a mouser like no other, Top Cat.
Running from house to house to find an owner, I wondered if I found one, would they think it was me, the cat killer? I might have to assure them that were it me, I would have been a blithering mess and incapable of coherent speech.
At the fifth house, a man with greying, almost shoulder length hair, answered the door. Yes, he had a ginger cat, a rescue cat about two years old.
Clamped under his arm was The Guardian and in the other hand, a half eaten baguette. A hoop of onion had escaped onto the man’s white t-shirt. I felt relieved. Why? How shallow I am. If a messenger turned up on my tiny doorstep, my husband with his shaved head and hard chin would be liberal and well mannered too.
So I ran with Guardian man and when he cried on the cat’s body, I cradled him too. Then I gave him a towel from my car, a dirty dog towel. We had a short, polite tussle over my giving up a precious towel – the blood might not wash out. I no longer needed the towel, I said. I have a hundred, no, a thousand towels.
I didn’t take the number of the car that killed the cat and I never asked what the cat’s name was. A name would have made a hard thing harder. Perhaps it’s good that I don’t know who hit and then ran. It’s just a cat. No law says you have to stop. Unless you count decency and kindness of course. Maybe the driver was young and frightened. Or old and agitated? I don’t want to believe differently.

First Edition

I’m a big fan of First Edition magazine, although I do wish they’d stop playing around with arty backgrounds so we can actually read all of the poems and short stories.

Last month Spiral Skies - never know if it’s okay to print real names or not – had a wonderful short story in First Edition and this month Lane had a great poem published by them.

Congratulations to both writers.

I’ve submitted my second to last assignment to my tutor on the Open University’s Creative Writing Course. In June I’ve opted to send the first three chapters of a novel rather than poetry or nonfiction. This week I’ll be writing an eighteenth draft of my first chapter.

Or wiping off those felty lines of dust you get between the skirting boards and the carpets.

Shall I go to Cork?

I am still incredulous that I am a runner up in Fish's One Page Story. And honoured too.
Should I go to Cork for the prize giving? It's a long way and the pirate and I are both students - very, very mature ones. But it looks so much fun and to be with other writers would be like coming home.

I am Born

Looking over a draft of a short piece I did for my Open University course, I thought I'd post it because it's my birthday. I might even have some cake.

I am Born

I was born just after McCarthy died - perhaps worn out from brutalising America - when business men wore bowler hats, when free love was waiting in the wings and when my mother still believed she loved my father.
In the 'burbs of Surrey, Bearstead hosptial was the birthing Mecca for the middle classes - as long as they were Jewish. This was no obstacle for my father, a boy from the Gorbals, who wore a chip on his shoulder as heavy as the Burma Star won when he was no more than a child.
'My money's as good as anyone else's,' he would have hissed, running his fingers through blue black hair and staring out from a face still little
more than a scull, for I think that most of him died in that war.
My mother would have lain in her confinement in a four women ward, its womb pink walls patterned with shadows from the large fire.
With gossamer negligees wrapped around their swollen bodies, executives' wives hung tiny white gowns to warm for expected off spring.
And once born - bonding not yet been invented -
Jamaican midwives, delivered with Windrush, would laugh and catch slippery babes in their magnificent arms and then glide like galleons under sail, to the nursery,far away.
'I didn't even miss breakfast,' my mother would have smiled at my father, still dressed in his suit, a Lucky Strike in his pocket.
I think my unobtrusive entry made my mother immediately fond of me.
As for my father, he just loved me.
***